L.A. Street Food Fest Goes Beyond the Food Truck

The L.A. Street Food Fest brings a diverse swath of L.A. street food — not just from food trucks, carts, stands and pop-ups but also from celebrity chefs and brick-and-mortar restaurants — to the Rose Bowl on July 11.

“We never considered ourselves a food-truck event, even though we became built that way,” founder Shawna Dawson says. The festival's first year, 2010, was at the height of the food-truck craze — and, as a result, most of its vendors were trucks. “As we got bigger, we knew we wanted it to be what it was always intended to be — a street-food event. Restaurants are inspired by street food. Same goes for stands, carts and pop-ups. Street food is way more chef-oriented than truck-oriented.”

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Dawson grew up in L.A. and spent much of her life eating food from vendors who were never represented at the city’s growing number of food festivals. In fact, she noticed that many events had only the same 20 or 30 names attending, mainly because festivals require the food to be donated and many small producers don’t have the resources for that, she says.

The L.A. Street Food Fest was created as a way to give exposure to L.A.’s most underrepresented food-slingers. It does this by subsidizing most of the food costs for its vendors, which include a curated selection of taco, burger and dumpling makers you’ve probably never heard of.

The festival's offerings and participants have expanded each year, and have come to include cocktails from Corner Door and Magnolia House, ice cream from Salt & Straw and popsicle pop-ups, coffee from Copa Vida and Frijolitos Mobile Coffee and — new this year — doughnuts from Donut Friend and Colorado Donuts. An Artisanal L.A. station (Dawson is also a founder) will feature small-batch jerkies, jams, pies and more.

This is also the first year that Dawson and her team have had to say no to a few vendors — because there wasn’t enough room at the 5,000-capacity event. They received more than 100 requests to participate from vendors willing to come from as far away as Tijuana (yes, La Guerrerense is still coming up from Ensenada with her famous ceviche).

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“We have gone back and forth between really just dropping the word ‘street,’” Dawson says. “Ultimately that’s what this is: a celebration of L.A. food, the many expressions of that, which ultimately, in Los Angeles, has some level of street-food inspiration.”